I Thought Time Might Help Me Win This Game Thursday, Feb 5 2009

It’s been the same dream over and over again, every night, without fail, for about nine months now. No matter what fragments of memory and thought my mind pull together to weave a story, it always seem to take the shape of the same plot — I’m back in Oxford, standing on the outskirts of a party, and the attendants are everyone I know and love. They’re staring at me, pensively, apologetically, as if to say ‘I know, I know, it’s not fair, but she’ll throw a fit and hurl objects’. And then, of course, there she is, giving a mischievous, smug grin as if to say ‘I told you I could do it. I told you I could drive a wedge between them and you. And I did.’ From there I slink the midnight streets alone like a middle schooler without a dance partner until convulsed upwards from my slumber, coated in a drafty sweat and left realizing that it was not, in fact, just a dream.

Distance is no escape. The gentle souls I live with, who benevolently avert their eyes when I groggily crack the morning’s first to escape this nightmare and reality, stay at her place when we visit and attend the same parties that I dream about. I’m left to stumble from bar-to-bar alone, counting the minutes until the coast is clear, when they will call me to meet up for a token drink and mock her as if it somehow makes me feel better.

If I speak out about it, which I occasionally do in moments when my brain is sludge, they do just about everything but roll their eyes at me, asking with condescension if the Captain’s kids are really that important. I want to take it all away from them and ask the same sneering question. They often act as if my bitter indignation is somehow putting them in a tough spot. And it is. But their knowing guilt has something to do with it as well. I don’t believe that it’s anyone’s fault, but it seems that everyone, including myself, is laden with remorse, which causes us to lash out at any accusing party.

Before Captain’s, I had often found myself in an overly spacious downtown Cleveland studio that smelled of the hipster Brooklyn house parties I used to attend when I was still alive, the aroma of radiator heat and old building structure. It was inhabited by a paroled felon we called The Duke, and usually about a half-dozen of his closest drug buddies coupled with the passing customer or two. The Duke would take bumps of meth and coax junkies into letting him beat them at chess, while I’d sit on a piss-and-jizz stained couch in a vacant-eyed, frozen stupor, thinking about Her and watching a pale kid with an emo swoop smoke hash out of tin foil.

About four years later, the place still smells the same. The Duke is much paler and seems to have lost weight, hair and about a half-dozen of his back teeth, but the shit-eating grin he gives when he opens the door to find my arms outstretched in faux-triumph is timeless.

“Hollywood,” he says with astonishment. “A fucking ghost at my door!” He cackles manically, and hugs me, and I lament how tightly I hug him back.

“So where the fuck have you been?” he asks, scraping out a line and sliding the powder-frosted mirror towards me, which I slide right back. I will do just about anything to scramble the thoughts of my brain, but the goal at the end of the day is to put myself to sleep. In my dreams, at least there’s the possibility of a neuron misfiring, causing my consciousness to enter a different world where I can still be with the people that saved from this place.

“Heaven and back,” I say, nodding towards the small mason jar stained with the residue of hash. Duke begins to unscrew the cap while one of his caved-and-purple-armed minions provides me with a fresh beer. A Van-Damme movie that no one is watching plays from the television. The raccoon-eyed skeleton in the corner begins to make eyes at me, rubbing the pock marks that litter the inner joint of her elbow. At first glance, it appears that once upon a time she was beautiful.

Letting the first hit trickle and twist from my mouth like a bellydancer, I can see their faces — Valerie, Bryan, Marie, Kevin, Amber, Tim, Becky, David, Lana, etc. They’re all shaking their heads with a look of disdain. I brush it off, knowing that these thoughts are merely the machinations of my brain. In reality, they’re all out together somewhere, drinking and laughing in the electric night streets like we all used to.

This is all in my head. This is nobody’s fault but my own…right? Right.

“How about a dirty bump?” I ask with a wheeze, pointing towards the small pile of tan powder sitting on the edge of the table next to a bent and blackened spoon. “Just a bump, though,” I clarify, thinking of them. They are my reason to stop and my reason to keep going.

If an unaffiliated stranger were to wander into this drug-infested hell right now, I wonder if they’d see me as something that didn’t belong, as something that should transcend all of this, or if they would just lump me in with the rest of them? On the surface, there’s no discernible difference – I’m just as lost and desolate – but my eyes still contain a softened, burning soul that seems faded from the rest of them. They always have, even when I was here the first time around. I’m not sure if it’s subsided any since then, but I’ve been trying to burn out that fire for years, and the only way I know how is to jump in with the lifeless.

The Duke sculpts two miniature mountains, and we talk about the Cavaliers, because I don’t want to talk about anything else. I just want escape this recurring nightmare, and if that means propelling myself into a deeper, darker one, so be it. It’s a knee-jerk reaction, but in a way they all are.

I inhale it through my nose with an eye-opening jolt and hope that tonight my dreams are something different. They don’t necessarily need to be any less haunting — just different. I desperately and silently apologize to everyone I know and love while Duke takes my rook.

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But First You Must Learn How To Smile As You Kill Saturday, Jan 31 2009

I don’t think that there’s anything more detrimental to our society than the twenty-somethings who sit before me, splayed out across an L-shaped couch in white tees, basketball shorts and ankle socks, reciting the lines from Wall Street in unison with the film while I wait for my dealer to measure out a bag of grass. Forget the Reds or the terrorists or global warming – those that they emulate are the root of every problem that the talking heads fret about, every ill we suffer, and they’re next up to the plate, a stronger mutation of the virus.

They’re hustlers-in-training, under the guise of business majors, armed to the teeth with a plethora of mantras  — ‘Greed is good’, ‘greed is right’, ‘Always Be Closing’ — mantras that emanated from the most tragic of cinema characters that were written as a metaphor for what rots us all. They quote and repeat them over and over, programming themselves before they make a pass at a girl or hit the lot and try to fleece someone on a Camry. They appear completely oblivious — as if they’ve just watched Rocky and only taken away from it that Apollo Creed is still the champ. Like their idol says, it’s a zero sum game. A winner and a loser.

“Lunch is for wimps,” they all call out in unison, pumping fists and nodding. They are not carrying it out in the name of irony.

“What’s with the Gordon Gekko worship?”

“Gordon Gekko is the fucking man,” one of them calls out as another rifles off the next quote.

“Gordon Gekko is a complete asshole. The whole point of the movie is that he’s a giant piece of shit.”

They look at me skeptically for a moment, as if I’ve suggested that the world is flat, before returning their attention to Michael Douglas ranting that he wants every orifice of a competitor to bleed, a line one of them mimics with enthusiasm while looking at me, as if to have the last word. My dealer plods down the stairs and after some cordial small talk I fork over the money and head out for Seth’s idling car. As we rumble over the red-brick streets, I gaze through the window at the breeding ground for these little Gekko apprentices. Their wildest fantasies are to become commodities brokers, only biding their time here until they’re ready to start stepping over the backs of whoever stands between them and the top.

Each and every one of them probably have a blue-and-white French shirt hanging neatly in their closet, purchased in an attempt to emulate this parasitic idol, who stands for a larger representation of the bankrupt system we carry out. They study business, because they want to be businessmen — a non-descript term that loosely translates to ’someone who makes money’. It does not matter how. Sales and marketing for investment firms, telecommunications outfits, tobacco companies, automobile dealerships, knife sets, weapons manufacturers, anything that signs the check. One wonders…would they peddle smack if it sold on the NASDAQ? Would they broker the sex trade of Cambodian teenagers if it was an acceptable market? Would they suck horse cock if it was considered a commodity that brought in six-figures?

Contrary to what you may have heard, it isn’t money that is the root of all evil, but rather discontentment. They chase money for the same reason that I chase highs — the dissatisfaction we have with the lives we’re in. And if wasn’t money, or drugs, or women, or power, it would be some other soul-peeling pursuit that can never be truly satisfied. To move forward in this world one must nullify themselves. We need something to consume us, to captivate us, because we’re not finding it where we find ourselves. It’s in the next sale, the next hit, somewhere other than where we currently stand. What we have before us is never enough.

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Always Searching For What’s At Home Sunday, Jan 25 2009

I went to Johnny Cash’s burial site once. I’m not a Man in Black die-hard or anything. It was just something to do. He’s buried next to June in a town called Hendersonville, just outside Nashville. We left caffeine pills and a cigarette on his grave. Seth had grown a ridiculous looking mustache for the occasion, and we both wore cowboy hats with aviators. An old man led us to the site, and also showed us where Cash’s parents were buried, giving an impromptu history lesson along the way. The wind was bitter and so fierce that I often found myself holding down my hat. Like any road trip destination, I was glad to have seen it through, and didn’t want to be anywhere else. But there’s a certain lament involved in getting there. Getting there signals that it’s almost time to turn back for home.

We had spent the previous night laying at the base of Nashville’s tallest building. That’s my favorite thing to do in big cities that sleep at night – get lit up and lay at the base of a mammoth structure. The first time I’d done it was at the Hancock Building in Chicago. A friend and I had bought a bag of grass from someone who was freestyle rapping in the streets of Wicker Park, and just drove around Michigan Avenue until it seemed like the thing to do. It felt like I was floating and rising and plummeting all at the same time.

Before taking in the AT&T Building, we ate at a diner in Nashville called Rotier’s where they serve cheeseburgers on soft French bread and you can get Coke in a bottle. One of us didn’t have enough money to eat, so we piled together enough crumpled ones and change to get her a sandwich. The first bar we drank at after dinner was an open-air patio where a beautiful redhead sang sad country songs and you could write on the tables. I wanted to be in this city for the first time for the rest of my life.

On the way into Nashville, we had stopped at a country buffet place in Lebanon Junction, Kentucky owned by an old married couple. They drench steaming carrot slices in bourbon, and make you feel like you were a guest in their home. A few hours after we had eaten there, I bought a gaudy-framed replica of a painting in a flea market for a girl who I no longer speak with. We took a cave tour in the early afternoon, and tipped our long-haired guide with marijuana. His name was Jared, and he said it was the best tip he had ever received. I like the idea of Jared recanting the story to amused friends, wheezing as he tried to hold in the smoke, briefly escaping the drudgery of Cave City, Kentucky.

After the bourbon carrots and the flea market and the cave, we stayed over in Louisville, eating sushi at a quiet place that had little waterfalls dribbling off of rocks, later winding up at a laughably low-rent strip club that didn’t charge cover and didn’t mind unders. The girls had never been to a strip club, and we warned them that it was fun just so long as you didn’t look them in the eye. The strippers danced not on the stage, but on the bar right in front of us, balancing clear stilettos on a narrow plank. Not counting the two dollar Budweisers, we spent twelve dollars there, enough to captivate the attention of every girl in the place, save for one in the corner working out an arrangement with a john. The little plastic stands that normally advertise drink specials listed a thinly-veiled offer for twenty-two dollar handjobs. It felt good to be away from home, even if that meant being here, laughing at the fact that while most of our friends and co-workers were cramming into overpriced Daytona Beach hotel rooms, we were in a joint called Girls!, making small talk with the thick-accented naked strangers who rubbed themselves three feet from our beer.

The days before that and the days after don’t seem as memorable, nor did I feel as alive. They were probably as minutia-filled as the incidents described above, the anecdotes no more or less entertaining. But they were regimented, predictable, non-transitory and stationary. And like the immediate present, when strung together, the memories of the path to Hendersonville don’t seem to mean much, or carry much metaphorical or literal weight. But they will be all that I have to talk about when life has passed. They will be my only possession on my death bed.

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Better Off As A Fool Than The Owner Of That Kind Of Heart Sunday, Jan 25 2009

I am quick to deride the world around me as unwittingly bloodthirsty and selfish and unfair. I’m often self-presented/known as a skeptic, the sour note, the source of foaming, jealous anger. The most astute and heart-warming compliment that my mother has ever given me was that I reminded her of Hugh Laurie on House. And all of that is entirely true. And I’m proud of it, I am. I believe in it, and I stand behind it. I relate to House’s bleak and snark-filled remarks. I spend far too much of my day being disgusted by this place and the masses who inhabit it. But I’d like to break from that truthful trend for just a moment to gush about Valerie. Because I think she’s a stitch in the silver lining in all of this, and the most inspiring part is that she doesn’t even know it.

She is beautiful, staggeringly beautiful. Ocean blue eyes, rosy cheeks, wonderful smelling voluminous hair, personality, wit, humor, empathy, heart. Smile-inducing zen within the flaws. All seemingly effortless. If you’re smart enough, your knees turn to gelatin when she walks into the room — man, woman, child, gay or straight.  Perhaps she doesn’t seem as wise as an old, fluffy-haired, lengthy-goateed philosopher, but I bet if you published the more memorable quotes that I’ve heard her utter in my lifetime, they would makes as much profound sense as the wisdom of Confucius. She’s the kindest thing since Mother Theresa, the sexiest thing since Monroe, and the most beautiful thing since caterpillars grew wings.

And I don’t write this because I pine for her, or because I want to stick my dick in her, as is normally the case with those who possess her rare blend of beauty and charm. I write it because I don’t pine for her, because I don’t jack off to her, or buy her drinks while I try to figure a way into her jeans, and because despite all that, I still lose my shit when she walks into the room. And that amazes me. It makes me think that maybe I’m not lost. Maybe – just maybe – I’m not just a creation of the media and my testicles.

If you just try to use her as pawn in the chess game of your own satisfaction, or blink and miss her, you will end up the loser. Perhaps you don’t see that, and perhaps she doesn’t see it, either. But I do, and I can assure you that one day, if you think about it properly, you will. And I’m not proclaiming to be a wise man of any sort, or even implying that all that many are missing the big picture (most who meet her, love her) – I’m just saying that I’ve had enough wins and losses to know a thing or two. There’s a lot of people who are far wiser than I am…but then again, the dolts failed to elect her as the university’s Homecoming Queen, a menial pursuit that she earnestly aspired for. Perhaps I’m speculating upon stereotypes, but I bet whoever won spent most of their time making themselves puke while Valerie made others feel good. I know life isn’t fair, but if anyone I know deserves fair in this world, it’s her.

If the world can’t see that this girl deserves a consensus-elected tiara, or that slick-talking dimwits don’t deserve their vote/adoration, then perhaps I’m not as dense as I constantly tell myself I am. Because I know I’m right on this one. I don’t inflate her worth. This one is for real. She’s so wholly beautiful and earnest, a rarity in this world, and as long as I can actively admire that beauty, it isn’t such a terrible place. I see her face in every natural, enriching desire that I desperately need and search for it when it’s void from every implanted, debilitating desire that I foolishly want.

Oscar Wilde once said (and a girl once reprinted on the back of a farewell letter envelope), that in order to truly be able to love someone, you must first be able to love yourself. And on a level I believe that. But I only know how to love madly. And sometimes I feel that falling madly in love with one’s self produces certain character flaws — flaws that would prevent one from being the best person that I think a girl like her deserves. Though I spend a great deal of time loathing myself, deep down I’m madly in love with myself, my thoughts, my mind. It’s the mirror and how I think the world perceives me that shakes me up.

But as in love with myself as I may be, and as devoted as I am to the idea and reality of her, I would curse a world that saw her devoted to me. Whatever makes her happy will always make me happy, but I simply don’t deserve to find myself as a catalyst for the rise and fall of that disposition (and the layman could never notice — she’s always sunny and seventy-two with a slight breeze, no matter what the weather). It’s not that I think I’m worthless…more that she’s just that special.

One needs conviction in this world, and while I may not have the conviction to take care of my own self, I’m convinced that I will love this woman until my last Marlboro-contaminated breath. I love this woman for all of the right reasons, and that’s something that survives libido, communication, disappointment, time and hope.

If I could love myself half as much as I love her, I might smile as half as much as she does.

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You Just Want To Be On The Side That’s Winning Saturday, Jan 17 2009

The students have scattered home for the holidays, and Captain’s has scaled it’s dinner shift down to three unsupervised employees, one of whom is sent home at eight. My favor repayments saved up from years of taking any shift at any time coupled with Devin’s schedule authority has led us to scramble everything around in order to find ourselves as the lone two closers nearly every night. Once the coast is clear, we fill our styrofoam cups with rum from upstairs and reminisce about simpler times when we didn’t hold animosity towards one another. We horde all ten of the free jukebox songs, and she lets me pick every one, which both warms and saddens me. We talk about who we’ve become in the few short months we’ve been distant. It’s one of those strings of shifts that feels like a decade.

She has been preoccupied with the fizzle of another grand romantic dream, and I’ve been listening. With each shift and each peeling of another layer, her lungs pump faster in a fight to keep the liquid from rushing to her eyes. On one occasion, I find myself so indignant at His alleged casual dismissal of her that I soften my shell and run my hand over her shoulder without thinking about the contradictions and give the tired speeches and dash off to frantically pace upstairs while I smoke in solitude. I recognize that part of it is jealousy and regret. But it runs far deeper than that. I see something in her – something I saw in myself once, and I don’t want some sparkling fool’s gold fucking it up like it did for me.

“I think in order to truly love something, you have to be equally capable of hating it.”

We’re sitting at the closed bar under the dimmed lights, two drinks into the lone drink we’d agreed to. I can’t quite recall what vague philosophical debate/roundabout discussion of our present feelings led to her expressing this sentiment, but I remember it word-for-word. I laughed it off – to have the upper-hand and because I believed it to be false, riding a wave of unmitigating, open-armed love and forgiveness fostered by this job/my head. I broke down the flaws of her thesis. I told her that someday she would understand. I give her advice that someone I wanted to be would believe.

If she had said this to me a few years ago, a few less pieces of pieces of heart crumbled away, the percieved wisdom coming from the percieved beauty would’ve fired up the hissing wicks in my veins, slithering them towards the dynamite of my insides – the kind of explosion that often reduces me to a useless factory of daydreams and should-I-call-her? musings. But I’m older now. Wiser. I know better. Back then, I would’ve been head over heels in love with her unpredictability and false sense of assurance.

Who am I kidding? I still am. I just fight it. And like the full moon to a werewolf, the act turns me into something hideous.

It took far too long for me to figure out, but she was entirely correct about the whole love/hate thing…at least in terms of souls like ours. It’s a dizzying tightrope of contradictions for our ilk, and her early recognition of that should make me want to hold her until the snow melts. But instead I dismiss it with a nose snort, all because of vanity and stupidity. The roadblocks between us are a result of traits we both mirror. I can never decide if I find that to be a detracting thing or an idea that causes more wonderment. Either way, I can see where we’re both going wrong, and it’s such a fucking waste.

The girl is so much more sophistiated than the cunts she attempts to ape. Her awareness is far greater than the surrounding atmosphere/reservations allows her/me to realize. But even when she is astutely aware…it doesn’t seem to affect the same tragic outcome. I foolishly want to find a way to let her see what she’s worth, because somehow I feel that it will atone for my past-and-present-self making the same mistakes.

In order to think and see and live properly, one must be destroyed. And I don’t mean being disappointed, or raped, or broken-up with, or paralyzed in the fear that they’ll all laugh at you. Those are mere flesh wounds. I’m talking about the kind of destructive force that turns heads into melons, bones into powder, dreams into nightmares. The kind that makes you think that you’re either the only sane person alive or absolutely out of your mind. The kind that leaves you digusted with everything you love, but the same kind that makes you quick to shrug your shoulders and embrace it all anyway. And not just out of settlement, but simply because you love it, and you’re too weary to believe that you’re worth more. When you’re in love with what you love, life moves along much more smoothly.

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Now You Don’t Talk So Loud Tuesday, Jan 13 2009

I walk the shining August afternoon red-bricked streets that will forever run through my blood, on my way towards Captain’s, which, coming from campus, is the first place to eat or drink on the town’s hilltop commerce district. It’s location, patio and lax eye has always made it ideal for attracting the underage crowd, one of the reasons it’s been there for nearly a quarter of a century. My first bar drink in this town was there, on my first night visiting as a potential transfer, with a good man named DiSalvio who later made good for himself in Chicago. It was a Jack and Coke. I’ve never liked Jack, and had never drank it beyond a lack of options. But I was about to let this town become a part of me, and in my mind decided that I needed something stiff.

Years and lives later, I’ve found myself stopping in to inquire about a job set up by my new roommate and current Captain’s delivery driver. It’s hard to imagine that not so long ago I was on a skyrocket to another plane of existence. An impressive resume, eye-popping entry-level offers, exuberance and talent. And then I met a girl and fell out of touch with myself and everything sort of unwound. Now I’m looking to flip burgers in order to pay rent and feed addictions. The looming neon arch proclaiming the establishment’s name is asleep, and I walk in to find the room settled by darkness.

“Power’s out,” the man behind the bar with sharp glasses and an aging Caesar calls out. His arms are folded and he’s staring at a television screen that isn’t on. “I can serve beer for exact cash only.”

“Uh, actually I’m here to meet Bryan?”

“I’m Bryan.”

“I’m Dan…Phil’s roommate?”

“So you’re looking for work?” he asks, removing his arm from the fold to shake my hand.

“Yeah.”

“Are you in school?”

“Graduated.”

“Any other jobs?”

“No.”

“When can you start?”

“As soon as possible.” I have to contain myself. It’s never wise to let your eyes widen, to let the words come out too frantically. They might assume that you’re a desperate bum, which you are…but you don’t want to give them the connotations that implies. Most of the management of the world doesn’t understand that a desperate bum can ascend if they’re given the chance and possess the desire to.

“What’s your availability like?”

“Totally open…I’ll lose any job before I miss a Browns game and I’ll need the day off in the event that Bob Dylan dies.” Everyone always takes this comment as cheeky, but I’m as serious as a terminal diagnosis. In the unlikely event that I get a ‘real’ job someday, I imagine that I’ll never have to work on Sundays, and I can always just call in ‘personal’ if Bob passes.

I fill out an application as a formality, Bryan nodding that it’s good enough after I’ve filled in the pertinent boxes in the squinting darkness. I claim no exemptions. I am told to come in the next morning at ten to train. The last four digits of my Social are to be my punch-in code. Ask Nick for a shirt when I get there.

And that’s it. The entirely trajectory of my life is changed by that everyday, semi-formal exchange with a stranger. Bryan will go from the man who hired me to the boss I’m afraid of to the boss who lets me off too easy to a kind-hearted friend who suffers the empathetic ills of living in a cold-hearted world. Valerie will go from the girl who I had Spanish with to the girl who taught me how to wrap burgers like a gift to my favorite human being on the face of the planet. Seth will go from the boyfriend of a friend to a roommate to the most kindred of souls. Marie will become the life raft that allows me to seek comfort in my destruction while always quick to listen to the screams of my pain…to think that she started out as the short girl who left early on my first shift. Phil will go from classmate to sudden roommate to one of the most selfless and brimming people I’ve ever met. Amber will go from the cheery girl who became the first person I let myself friend in months to my closest confidant to Seth’s girlfriend to someone whose sneer lights up my insides with regret and anger, leaving me buzzing like the top score of a pinball machine. David will go from the droopy-eyed, pot supplying bespectacled doorman to my most-trusted and supportive corner man, one of the people that I most aspire to be like in this world. Devin will go from the weird, needy girl who fell for me to the run-of-the-mill, flitting girl who spurned a weird, needy me. I will go from a broken man to an enlightened man and break myself again.

Everything will change. Love will pour into my heart like a thick-based can of red paint. Anger will consume me to the point of physical and mental destruction. I will understand the greatest love I’ve ever had, a non-singular love that is borne within myself and not an idea. All because I desperately took a job that requires an apron when I allowed my life to bottom-out. Bottom-out. Ha! That was a fucking paradise. A Shangri-La I will never again re-discover. I’d fight armies to shake Bryan’s strange hand for the first time again.

It’s the moments you don’t ponder that make or break you.

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Is Any Song Worth Singing If It Doesn’t Help? Tuesday, Jan 13 2009

Long after the bottles have been wrapped in plastic and the the bar has been wiped down, after the post-shift drinks have been polished off, while the drunken girls I served all night lay on their back and take the staggering and uncomfortable plows from the drunken boys they dream are real, I walk the streets. I walk and think of you. And you and you and you. And me. I talk to the stray cats that cautiously straddle the alley walls. They never have anything to say, but I think on some level we understand each other.

I give terse, head-nodding acknowledgements to the rest of the passing lonely (we can spot each other from a mile away). I gaze at houses that I used to spend the occasional night in, back when I didn’t think much, which now have new tenants and fresher paint jobs. I make symbolic pauses in areas where we once kissed, and wonder whether or not I’m doing it because I truly miss you or because society taught me to. I smoke entirely too many cigarettes. I ponder the potential of all of us living amongst each other instead of within our own ravenous heads, where we are eager to find solace in the lifeless and irrational eyes of the cannibals that surround us.

I don’t think anyone residing on these streets is happy. It’s easy to convince one’s self that they are happy. Beauty or money or a good conversation when you’re starved for one, the acceptance of society; any of these things will take care of it most of the time. The obvious thought is that I feel this way because I’m viewing them through the lens of my own temperament. But nothing these streets has to offer will bring us any closer to who we really are, to contentment. We’re just going to drift further and further away, until we wake up one day and realize that when you chase a flimsy and shallow plot, you generally end up with your life having one. We may as well just equip ourselves with bits and blinders, and let the world guide us around by the reins.

Once upon a time, I thought I was happy here. Perhaps I was. But looking back on it, the whole thing felt like a mere illusion, a mantra repeated in the mirror every morning. A delicious and inspiring fable concocted by me to put to bed the fears of myself. The older I get, the more I’m convinced that the idea of being happy has a direct correlation with ignorance, not wisdom. Getting it right doesn’t necessarily lend to joy. Living in the moment without a cognizant awareness does.

I doubt that I’d mind so much if this town burned to the ground. Go ahead and raze it, red brick-by-brick. I want to erase every bar and fresh-smelling pink bedroom plastered with taped-up photos. It’s not like the classrooms are serving us with a greater purpose. Their best use is pretentious English majors talking about the way life should be before they grab a four-dollar latte. Burn the whole fucking place down. Torch every thread of designer clothing and every memory of the false lives we yearn for. When you’re finished with Oxford, take out the rest of country. Start with D.C. Everyone reconvene around the smoldering ashes and we’ll try to sort it all out from there. Maybe we can start acting like the enlightened people we were all told compromised the majority of humanity.

Just put down the gun and let’s talk about this.

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I’ll Save My Breath and Take It With Me Monday, Dec 22 2008

The maniacal energy that lights the streets of last call passes before me in a slow-motion sway, and watching it all I can’t decide who I want to be. The giants, Polo shirted and short skirted, laughing and kissing and crying and shouting, entirely oblivious to anything but the immediate sensation before them, pinballing to wherever they can find another drink or a hand to hold, or the dwarves, contemplative and weary-eyed, walking home with backpacks and hands in pockets and slouched shoulders, taking notice of all the thoughtless smiles and catcalls, standing behind the ice cream counter fielding the boisterous and muddled orders of the drunken giants. I don’t think I want to be either.

Devin is out of town for the weekend, so I am invited back to the girls’ house where everyone has gathered on the porch, doling out cans and chain smoking and retelling Captain’s lore of semesters passed. Shivering in a black dress, Becky and I slip into the house so I can give her the Browns t-shirt underneath my button up. We haven’t spoken much in the last few months, but earlier in the evening chaos had led us to conversation over pitchers and eventually back here. She is leaving in the morning for Alabama, and I’m fairly certain that she’s never coming back.

“Y’know,” she says with a laugh as I peel it off and toss it to her. “If you put half as much into your life as you do your football team…”

“So why did we stop talking?” I ask abruptly, buttoning up.

“Because you don’t do anything to better yourself.” Her answer comes quicker than I’d have liked it to, sharp and void of any contemplation. “Do you know how many people would kill for your talent? And you piss it away…I mean, you’re wasting away here, Dan. These people don’t matter, and you know that. You’re better than all of this.”

I don’t think she’s wrong, but I think when she says ‘all of this’ she means a bar full of confused and fraudulent twenty-one year olds. And the way I see it, the world is mostly compromised of confused and fraudulent twenty-one year olds; as age and careers and families progress, we never shed the fears of confusion and alienation or the desire of freedom and possibility. We merely grow old and seek ways to keep preoccupied, narrowing in on arbitrary successes that distract from the failures of dreams and past.

Becky is beautiful, honest, and has a soul – a young, murky, unpredictable soul, the kind Kerouac talks about. Somewhere down the line I imagine she’ll stifle it for stability and the finer things in life, and I think I would do that if I could. But I can’t seem to find the temperament to believe in this world. If I heeded her advice and made an attempt at a future, it would likely end on a sour note. Pessimism is often confused with realism, and while I may be able to bang out a few pages of eloquent words every now and again, none of it is anything that would be profitable. And even if it was, and I’m just being self-defeating, a Pulitzer is as meaningless as a million dollars – neither would do much in the way of my view that we are all lost in search of something that doesn’t exist.

“It drives me crazy to watch you throw your life away. I mean, I had to stop talking to you because it just…you remind me of my mother. She just gets eaten up in this vicious cycle of depression and apathy…and it’s just too hard to watch.”

Her voice has taken on that of an impassioned plea, as her mother is one of the larger demons in her days, and I just want to hug her. Hug her for caring so much and for being honest and for having to deal with her mother or me or the rest of the animals. I want to hug her because we’re alive and we don’t know what to do.

Someone stumbles into the room looking for ping-pong balls, and we help to find them, sliding out to join the rest of them, the conversation hanging on agitating ellipses. I make the transition from confrontational honesty to casual beer talk, and as I listen to Joe slur the notable stories from the previous night’s bar shift for the third time, I think to myself that while she may be right that I’m too pessimistic to better myself, she’s casting too much doubt on these people.

She’s always been distrustful of the people around us, and finds solace in the thought of leaving this cesspool, though she doesn’t know that the whole fucking planet is a cesspool and the people who inhabit it, as sick and lost as they seem, are timid and kind at heart, no different than we are, merely swept up in the machine that whirs fluidly whether we fight or submit. We seek out the world when it is right in front of us.

But I see no difference in trying to ascend or toiling here, in finding a wife or taking home a stranger, in exercising regularly or letting my teeth fall out. I see neither path as righteous and both as futile. And that’s a terrible burden to bear when you see the earnest faces of those who care. The last conversation Becky and I had took place months ago, during a break from painting her room. She remarked at one point that when I spoke about life I talked as if I was dying, and in a way I think I am, because the way I feel is like a black cancer that spreads fiercely and rapidly, rotting away my soul. And every day that I wake up and walk through this world is another cigarette, a little too much time in the sun, a worsening of the situation. I see no difference in telling this to a shrink or drinking it off or surrendering. The people around me – the Beckys of the world – are the only thing that seem to make those thoughts particularly troubling to me.

As the beers dwindle, a few of us plot a trip out to an Indiana diner, and Becky is not in the fold as she must catch an early flight. Her ride starts the car parked out front as mine awaits out back. We exchange a knowing, brimming glance for awhile, as it’s one of those goodbyes in which both party is painfully aware that it’s a goodbye.

“Take care of yourself out there.”

“You, too,” she says, hugging me tightly and giving me one last soft look. “I believe in you.”

As I watch her dash off to the car, I wish I did, too.

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Burnin’ Out His Fuse Up Here Alone Friday, Dec 19 2008

Perched on two stools that feel like thrones, we shed the meloncholy frailty that comes with too much thought and become boisterous and carefree kings/jesters. Seth is (usually) Amber’s boyfriend, my roommate and one of the sharper employees of Captain’s. Held back only by the dim crowd around him, he doesn’t have a bad bone in his body, but he’s smart enough not to get it exploited. I can’t imagine anyone not liking him, but most seem to take enjoyment in his witty, charming, and at times obnoxious banter. Aside from the occasional late night drunken window of honesty, they aren’t really given a look into the more complex side, as he has mastered the art of inane college bar banter, and keeps himself on cruise control until he sense someone worthy.

It is somewhat disheartening to see how many road blocks have been set by a debilitating enviornment – when it comes from an unwitting source, a misogynistic joke or acting through the motions doesn’t so much bother me as when it’s coming from someone who knows better, who is just swimming with swine because it’s easier that way. And it’s hard to fault Seth or anyone for that, so I blame the world, and release the anger by mocking it over beers with him.

We mock them, and yet we pander to them.

Today/tonight we find ourselves at Mac’s, sliding from stools to a booth that becomes a revolving door of friends, acquaintances, potential bedmates, our condition and wit deteriorating with each new arrival. Bartenders are greeted or said goodbye to during shift change, and we learn that the sun has gone down during a cigarette break. We play the right songs on the jukebox and our one-liners are well-timed. We refer to the women as ‘girl’ and discourage others from leaving the bar in order to get on with life. Nachos and pitchers and shots are ordered. It’s always a party, and we’re always the life of it, and no one but us has any idea how bleak that existence really is.

He wants to be with her. He would – and has – abandon(ed) this in a heartbeat just to hear her take out life’s frustrations on him. When life presents me with a girl like that to pour my pent-up affections into, I often feel the same way as he does, and I think that’s why we’re here, sinking singles into the jukebox and ordering doubles for women we’ve just met and don’t particularly care for. Perhaps somewhere in the back of our minds we’re hoping our Ambers will walk through the door and see us in this pain/festivity, regardless of how unlikely geography or the fact that it’s lunch hour makes the prospect. Maybe we just don’t want to think or remember.

We’d both rather be somewhere else, but a fairly specific somewhere else, and without that prospect, this seems like the next best thing. We sing our songs of sorrow in respective bedrooms where no one can hear them, and check it all at the door. Here we are safe, easy, happy, free. The women are rarely challenging outside of sexual conquest, the regulars give us hugs and buy us rounds, spirits are lifted with shot specials or a Prince song, and no one will find it very troubling if we don’t return their phone calls the next week (or at least they won’t admit to it). The self-destruction seems more acceptable within these walls.

Afternoons turn to evenings, weekend into months, and we hurdle onwards, changing venues, filling up ashtrays, laughing in alleyways, frequenting strange living rooms, arriving at diners when they open. It’s not so much about the women or alcohol, but rather a dogged pursuit of something just out of reach – the returns on our emotional investments we’ve waited on for so long haven’t come, so we burn out our souls here in a frenzied last-ditch effort to recoup what we thought we had coming to us. Anything seems possible over a round.

The tragedy is not in our actions, but in the fact that we’re keenly aware of them. We know what we are doing and foregoing. We can see ourselves in each other, forcing lines and dispositions, pining over the unworthy, and while I think we love what we see at the core, we certainly see what’s gone wrong. Neither one of us has the insight, courage or hope to rectify any of it, so we let it pass and entertain the mundane details of two cute strangers’ trip to Kroger.

Everything I’m looking for in humanity sits across the booth from me, delivering soft-spoken and light-hearted quips to the girl next him. We aren’t yet aware how truly comforting and enriching the other’s presence is, as we’re too busy lamenting the inability to chase down the unattainable. But I’m rooting for him. I won’t make the first move without him, but I want to ditch these girls and make ill-advised proclaimations of embarrassing adoration for the women we’re drinking away. When they reject us, I want to pack up and move somewhere foreign. Arizona. Japan. Scranton. Anywhere but here.

I’m certain we’d find ourselves in similar bars, talking to similar girls, but to bolt in the night would be the endless possibility that we’re searching for. It’s not a solution, but for our ilk there are no solutions, there are only actions and consequences. I don’t know that it would make us any happier, but I doubt it would be half as disappointing than if we were to realize whatever unattained desires we’re drinking off right now.

We can examine each other’s desires and see the myriad of faults and overcomplications, but I doubt if given a magic wand either one of us would deprive the other of their mistake. He would like to be with Amber, and I don’t think it would do him any good, but it has to be better than watching him angle for a bottle blonde without an original impulse in her body. I don’t necessarily want him to be a better person; he’s fine as he is. I just want him to pursue what honestly matters to him, regardless of how chaotic and constructed it may be. But perhaps that’s just because I’ve decided to walk that lonely road myself.

I don’t find it so sad that we’re here. I’m more troubled by the thought that we’re really not missing all that much out there.

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Van Gogh Had Theo to Keep Him Alive Saturday, Dec 13 2008

My tenure at Captain’s was not one of my most virile, optimistic or desireable periods; my heyday had passed. But I was at my happiest. That’s a wonderful sentiment when you’re fifty and reflecting on your family. It’s a frightening one when you’re twenty-five and reflecting on those who won’t remember you in a decade. But I don’t feel twenty-five. I’ve had so many diluted drunks tell me that I have an ‘old soul’, and while I’m not buying their misery-deflecting rants, something is definitely up. I have way more tread on my tires than I should.

My time there was disparaged by some as reliving a lost past with people younger than me at a job beneath my qualifications. I don’t know that I can argue that assertion with a straight-face, but I’ve never been happier in my life, even during the past that I was allegedly attempting to recapture. At no period in my life have I ever felt more aware of my assets, faults, curses, and blessings. For an all-too-brief period I somehow managed to find myself able to accept all past/present/future shortcomings, and fall in love with the dizzying hope of the people around me. Perhaps I wasn’t always the most optimistic or joyous, but to be content despite those circumstances, to be able to smile warmly at the thought of the people around me, to get excited by banal exercise science majors and frat-minded doormen and prickly bosses…to be satisfied is what counts. Satiation over acquisition.

For whatever reason, I fell deeply in love with these people, some close friends, some barely acquaintances, some but a frame in the film my existence, but nonetheless, people I fell not madly and passionately in love with, but the people I fell comfortably and thoughtfully in love with. When one can fall in love with every roleplayer they chat with for thirty minutes every other day, something is going well.

I’ve thought it over far too much for my or anyone’s own good, and I’m afraid I can’t come to any other conclusion than that for the most part, the world is a very sick and disappointing place. And I’m not even talking about the heavy stuff. The triple homicides, genocides, ski-mask rapes, child abductions, slave labor, civilian bombings, guerilla combat, unnoticed starvation…to be quite honest my brain has been conditioned to be far too self-absorbed to meddle with any of that. I think mostly of the quiet desperation we all possess, the stifling of our souls, the mindless jobs and hobbies, the lies and manipulations we carry out in the name of things we don’t believe in. What percentage of our daily actions do you think magnify the average person’s ills as opposed to bettering them?

And there is no hope for any of this. It has always been this way and I fear it will always be that way as long as you can access these words. The best of us will succumb to it all in some form or another. The only thing one can do is find the courage to let it all go, to search for something you love, regardless of where it places you in relation to society. Be keenly aware that this is all chaos, and the object of your affection is apt to swiftly change. Just ride the wave. Do not fight it. You may find yourself swept away to somewhere desolate. Set up camp there. 

An old two story brick building with a red iron fenced patio populated by confused but unshackled souls yet to be bludgeoned, where I earned just enough to keep the lights on and the nights late – this, for a time, was all I ever needed. I can recall more affluent or attractive times, but even then I always wanted what was beyond. At Captain’s, a post-shift reuben over trivial conversation with a sorority girl co-worker was something that truly caused me to walk home with a little more spring in my step, and not because I thought I had the chance to bang her. My bubbling affections were in the moment, not a product of reminiscing or scheming. These comments may sound green and self-excusing, but I’m beginning to think we can only find true happiness in moments of cockeyed, gut-induced foolishness (hence the careers of Journey, Lionel Richie, Phil Collins, etc.).

None of it was perfect. I was a non-reactionary, slowly decaying shell of what I could’ve been. The boss I adored was a womanizer distracted by the bottom line of the profit sheet. The friends, lovers and co-workers I held great faith in were often attention-starved and lost without an emotional compass, and were apt to disown one over the ever-changing-machinations of gossip. It was nowhere near the family that my head and heart made it out to be. But I was always aware of that. Never did I lack the clarity to see what they were. And I loved them anyway.

I don’t want to ever find myself somewhere I couldn’t burst out of at a moment’s notice. The thought of the debilitations I would impose coupled with the aforementioned troubling world makes the thought of offspring absolutely terrifying. I have no desire to ever or own a home or have to use the word ’equity’ in conversation. Fidelity appears illogical to me and merely a way to avoid the solitude that occurs when our bodies pass attraction capabilities. Maturity always seemed to be nothing more than a sophistication of complications.

It doesn’t matter if they want to sleep with you. Nor does it matter whether or not they want to give you a job. You won’t be happier if they approve. Being better looking wouldn’t make life easier. He/She cannot complete you on their own. Constructed pretenses will always collapse into ruin. Success does not equal winning. True love exists not in duration or compatibility or notions of romance but in outlook. The former is a result of the latter.

I never wanted to fall in love with Captain’s or Oxford. I never wanted to throw in the towel and give up on a lucrative career or happy oblivion. I never wanted to appreciate the music of Lionel Richie in a non-ironic fashion. And I never wanted to leave. It just sort of happened.

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